Saturday, November 4, 2006

Movie Review: Babel

By John P. Meyer

Babel, the new film from director Alejandro González Iñárritu (21 Grams), is a towering accomplishment. What it undertakes is so ambitious, it verges on megalomania: the plotline attempts to do what Crash did, interconnecting events across individuals and cultures, but instead of confining itself to a defined geographical region (Los Angeles), it spans the globe.

What allows a project this vast to succeed boils down to thematic discipline. Iñárritu carries the same connecting theme across cultural and geographical boundaries, and that theme is simple (and ironic, given the scope of the story): complexity leads to error.

Babel

Armed with a Winchester rifle, two Morrocan boys set out to look after their family's herd of goats. In the silent echoes of the desert, they decide to test the rifle… but the bullet goes farther than they thought it would. In an instant, the lives of four separate groups of strangers on three different continents collide. Caught up in the rising tide of an accident that escalates beyond anyone's control are a vacationing American couple, a rebellious deaf Japanese teenager and her father, and a Mexican nanny who, without permission, takes two American children across the border. None of these strangers will ever meet; in spite of the sudden, unlikely connection between them, they will all remain isolated due to their own inability to communicate meaningfully with anyone around them.

Source: Cinema Source

• Showtimes and more on Babel

One of the reasons this holds true is that, when you're dealing with vast numbers of incidents (as, for instance, world governments do in an attempt to manage their vast numbers of citizens), categorization must be applied, simply as a means of processing the plethora of events. Otherwise, things bog down and nothing can be accomplished. If an entity's (or an individual's) coping mechanism of categorization succeeds in 95% (or 99%, or 99.75%) of the cases it encounters, it probably works for that entity (or individual). But the very act of categorizing builds in errors, even if they amount to only 0.25% of occurrences; and if you're on the receiving end of the categorization, and your situation happens (by random chance) to be a product of one of the 0.25% of occurrences in which the categorization fails, then you, my eccentric friend, are screwed.

You recall the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, right? Men became prideful and began building a tower to reach the heavens, aspiring to godhood. An angry God, sporting his well-worn Old Testament ten thousand gallon Black-Hat-O'-Vengeance, imposed separate languages on the prideful bastards so they could no longer understand each other. Realizing what chumps they'd been, and desirous (as who is not?) of keeping their lives simple, they slouched back to their local villages and spoke (in their various tongues) prayers of repentance. God smiled and kicked back with a cold one. [Um, God? It might be time for you to have a quick look at the recent tower building activities out there in Redmond, Washington. Your humble servant - Linus Torvalds.]

Well, Iñárritu's Babel is not so much about language barriers as it is about knowledge barriers resulting from misunderstandings of complex systems. On the far side of this narrative stream, one particular entity (the U.S. Government) stands the whole enchilada on its end and attempts to impose complex systems onto events and motivations that are so simple they should appear transparent - to anyone who knows what's really going on.

There are four distinct story lines in play (which equate to balls in the air if you’re a director) and each story fascinates as tension builds and complexities begin to unravel, until all that remains to be played out is that most rudimentary of human stories: life or death.

STORY 1: Into the home of a humble Moroccan family comes a neighbor bearing a wonderful gift: a high-powered rifle. The two boys, whose task it is to protect the family goats from marauding jackals, are given the rifle - without an explanation of the complexity or power of the device - to take with them on their daily herding rounds. To this point, Yussef and Ahmed (Boubker Ait El Caid and Said Tarchani) have targeted a tin can with thrown rocks from a distance of ten feet; suddenly, they’re given the ability to extend their influence enormously, and these are normal boys, and shooting the gun is FUN, and, hey, they wonder what would happen if they aimed it at something really far away, like - for instance - that bus laboring through the hairpin curves on the road half a mile below the hill where they're sitting. It's inconceivable to them that the bullets could reach that far. But could they?

STORY 2: A vacationing American couple travel across Morocco by tour bus; their itinerary calls for an unexpected detour when Susan (Cate Blanchett) is struck by a bullet seemingly from out of nowhere. Richard (Brad Pitt) must manage the complexity of the situation, which calls for finding the nearest thing to medical attention to be had within driving range, while Susan's life blood leaks steadily from her body.

STORY 3: In San Diego, Amelia (Adriana Barraza), the Hispanic nanny of two young American children whose parents are out of town, must find a way to make it to her son's wedding across the border in Mexico while still caring for her young towheaded charges. Their seemingly careless father has just called to tell her that he can't be home as planned, and insists she skip the wedding and take care of the kids. Then he hangs up the phone. Irresponsible son of a bitch.

STORY 4: In Japan, Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi) has more complexity thrown at her than the rest of the characters combined: a) she's a post-pubescent schoolgirl in a short skirt on an anti-panty campaign; b) she's deaf; c) her mother has recently died; d) attractive boys start out by liking her (because she's pretty), but when they discover she's deaf they run away like scared rabbits; e) the attractive boy who finally maintains an interest in her ends up making out instead with her deaf best friend; and f) even her middle-aged dentist, who she attempts to seduce, refuses to preside at her deflowering, though he's clearly the type of guy who reads those schoolgirl-in-short-skirt mangas in his off hours. Is it any wonder the poor girl develops the Mt. Fuji of inferiority complexes?

To add to this impressive array of storyline gymnastics, we come to find (through cuts from one story to another) that the plots which seem to be connected with each other are not necessarily synching up in time; Iñárritu has added a fourth dimension to his narrative and done so in a fascinating and revelatory way, though we don't begin to understand how until the film nears its end.

While the acting is stellar across the extensive cast list, two performances stand out for their raw honesty: 1) Adriana Barraza (as Amelia) shows us what it must be like to juggle loving motherhood against sacred responsibility while straddling two cultures and an international boundary. As her simple plan shatters into cancerous complexity, the anguish on her face transcends dialogue. 2) Rinko Kikuchi (as Chieko) goes through the kind of torment that all of us who survived adolescence will recognize, but she does to in silence. Ms. Kikuchi's pleading eyes, filled with a certain knowledge of her inadequacy, made me want to learn sign language so I could reach through the screen and let her know that her troubles were only temporary.

The film is almost 2 1/2 hours long, but you won't notice. (Unless you've been sipping an Extra Large Diet Dr. Pepper). At times you'll want to look away from the screen, but if you've got a pair (no offense, ladies) you won't, because there is powerful magic happening up there in the flickering lights, my friend - powerful magic.

UNFORGETABLE SEQUENCES:

Watching Cate Blanchett gaze thoughtfully out the window of the tour bus, knowing that - any time now - a bullet will strike her. The tension is painful.

Two from Chieko: 1) her upskirt flash in the J-Pop restaurant; 2) her final stripping away of artifice on the balcony of her apartment, and the resulting calmness that transforms her expression.

WORDS OF WISDOM:

"My Momma told me that Mexico is really dangerous." - young Mike to his "Auntie" Amelia, as Santiago drives them ever-deeper into Sam Pekinpahland; "Yes, it's full of Mexicans!" - Santiago to Mike.

"If you're lying, I'm going to come back and cut your balls off." - Moroccan police inspector to Yussef, who has just directed him on a wild goat chase.

This story was written by a member of the TexasGigs community

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